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Modern - Contemporary Museums News

The MoMA PS1 Archives

The Museum of Modern Art has opened the MoMA PS1 Archives to the public. The collection contains more than 300 linear feet, representing the entire history of the art space, from its opening in 1971 to the present (PS1 merged with MoMA in 1999). The majority of the material pertains to exhibition and press records, but the project description notes:

The records provide extensive documentary evidence of an institution that was in the vanguard of nonprofit spaces and at the heart of the 1970s and 1980s New York art world—and that continues to be a vital center for the exploration and exhibition of contemporary art today. Documentation of particular historical significance in the Archives includes records of the institution’s founding and growth in the early 1970s; exhibition and curatorial records for nearly 900 exhibitions and events over 35 years; materials documenting the National and International Studio Program and the publications program; and records of founder and former director Alanna Heiss.

In addition to the finding aids for the nine series of records, there are several web resources including a chronology, a publication history, an artists index, and a complete exhibition history. Several of these resources are cross-referenced for greater utility to researchers.

The MoMA PS1 Archives can be consulted by appointment at the MoMA Archives reading room at MoMA QNS, open Mondays, 11 am–5 pm.

For more information, visit the project website and the finding aids.

Image: “Exterior View of P.S. 1,” photograph by Jonathan Dent, 1976. MoMA PS1 Archives, VIII.I.8. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York.

 

Categories
East Asian VRC

The Buddhas of Mes Aynak Screening on Thursday 2/7

The Buddhas of Mes Aynak, a new film by Brent Huffman, Assistant Professor, Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University, will be screened at the University of Chicago on Thursday, February 7 at 4:30 pm in Swift Hall, Room 106.

The Buddhas of Mes Aynak directed by Brent E. Huffman  tells the story of the archaeological site, as well as the dangerous environment the mine has created for archaeologists, Chinese workers, and local Afghans. The film follows several main characters, including Philippe Marquis, a French archaeologist leading emergency conservation efforts; Abdul Qadeer Temore, an Afghan archaeologist at the Afghan National Institute of Archaeology; Liu Wenming, a manager for the China Metallurgical Group Corporation; and Laura Tedesco, an American archaeologist working for the U.S. State Department.

For more information view the film’s Facebook page.

Via UChicagoArts

Categories
Innovative Technology Modern - Contemporary Museums News VRC

Art Resources from the Mid-20th Century

The Guggenheim and Whitney Libraries have collaborated to digitize selections from the personal libraries of Hilla Rebay and Juliana, the inaugural directors of the museums, respectively. The digital library—Art Resources from the Mid-20th Century: Digitized Highlights from the Libraries of Hilla Rebay and Juliana Force—is available publicly via the Internet Archive. They describe how the collections were developed by Rebay and Force, female museum directors whose institutions were both founded in the 1930s:

Each woman acquired a considerable library during her tenure, collecting materials ranging from the uncommon (gallery announcements from New York and beyond, as well as rare and unusual periodicals and books) to the required reading of the day (exhibition catalogs and major monographs on contemporary artists). These important resources influenced the two women, who in turn influenced the vision and development of their respective institutions, which remain integral to the city’s cultural life today.

The museum libraries digitized selected volumes from each collection to display the materials together online, which helps highlight the similarities and differences between each collection. The Internet Archive, which hosts the collection, offers robust functionality including cataloging data, and the ability to view the fully digitized materials online in a book reader software or to download as a PDF of e-book reader file, including EPUB and Kindle.

To visit the project collection page for Art Resources from the Mid-20th Century: Digitized Highlights from the Libraries of Hilla Rebay and Juliana Force, click here. For more information, please also explore project summaries from the Guggenheim and the Whitney.

Categories
Exhibitions Innovative Technology Modern - Contemporary Museums News VRC

MoMA’s “Inventing Abstraction” Website and Exhibition

MoMA recently opened a new exhibition, Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925, and this ground-breaking survey is accompanied by an equally ground-breaking website. The exhibition takes a multidisciplinary look at the development of abstraction and as such:

The exhibition brings together many of the most influential works in abstraction’s early history and covers a wide range of artistic production, including paintings, drawings, books, sculptures, films, photographs, sound poems, atonal music, and non-narrative dance, to draw a cross-media portrait of these watershed years.

In the October, ARTnews reported that the Leah Dickerman, curator of the exhibition, was collaborating with Paul Ingram of Columbia University’s business school because he specializes in social network analysis. Dickerman wanted to visually display connections and friendships among the artists and creators involved in the genesis of abstraction, and she and her team, along with their business school partners, began mapping connections in an Excel spreadsheet. The project then turned into a dynamic network of artists and other creative types connected by vectors. They liken the project to a Facebook or LinkedIn network for the abstract vanguard.

In the ARTnews article, Paul Ingram “explains that the quality of ‘between-ness’ in the network—being on multiple paths between others—is associated with creativity. According to this measure, he says, Kandinsky is the most central figure in MoMA’s history of abstraction.” The interactive chart highlights key players in red, and for each artist represented on the chart, more information about their role, interests, and works is provided.

And as an aside, the ARTnews article mentions several other charts or family trees that had been created to document relationships (either sincerely or snarkily) in modern art movements—be sure to check out the very famous Barr’s Chart! These genealogical charts differ greatly from the social vectors described in the new MoMA chart, but provided the initial inspiration for the website’s diagram. Another “genealogical” example comes from the Irving Penn Archives, housed at the Art Institute of Chicago: Penn drew an a family tree, titled “An Immodest Claim to Artistic Roots,” in which he lists several of the artists included in MoMA’s Inventing Abstraction exhibition including Fernand Léger, El Lissitzky, and Man Ray. You can view his tree here.

The VRC will be adding images from the exhibition to our LUNA collection soon!

Via ARTnews

Categories
Architecture Images on the Web

The Chicago Aerial Photo Services Collection at UIC

Local blog Chicagoist recently posted about a Flickr set that UIC posted of the Chicago Aerial Photo Services Collection. You can check out the Flickr set, or explore the entire digital collection hosted by UIC. They describe the project:

The Chicago Aerial Photo Services (CAPS) collection has a number of aerial photographs from 1929 through the late 1940s. Primarily the photographs are of the Chicago area though there are some images from other areas of the state. They provide detailed images of both urban areas as well as countryside that would become suburbs in the future.

UIC’s digital collections also hosts several other collections pertaining to Chicago architecture, including the C. William Brubaker Collection of mid-to-late 20th century color photographs. For more information, visit the Chicago Aerial Photo Services (CAPS) collection or the C. William Brubaker Collection.
Via Chicagoist

Categories
Images on the Web Modern - Contemporary

The Henry Moore Foundation Online Catalogue

The Henry Moore Foundation recently launched an online catalog of Moore’s artwork, beginning with works owned by the Foundation. The catalog is searchable by genre, including drawings, graphics, sculptures, tapestries, and textiles as well as by thematic categories such as mother and child and reclining figures.

Users can download an enlarged image at 72 dpi, which will project well in CWAC classrooms.

For more information, visit the online catalog of Henry Moore Artworks.

Categories
Renaissance - Baroque

The Medici Archive Project

The Medici Archive Project has recently launched its BIA Digital Platform which allows users to search and view digitized material from the Medici Archive, which is housed in the Archivio di Stato di Firenze. In addition to viewing archival documents, users can enter transcriptions, provide feedback, exchange comments, and participate in digital humanities projects. From the project’s website:

The Medici Granducal Archival Collection (Mediceo del Principato)–among the most exhaustive and complete court archives of early modern Europe–is one of the most frequently consulted collections at the Archivio di Stato di Firenze. Over the past fifteen years, the Medici Archive Project has been using computing technologies to facilitate scholarly research on this collection. With BIA’s launch, the Medici Archive Project will double its online text content and it will inaugurate a new digital imaging function by putting online 120,000 digitized documents—a number that will continue to grow. Additionally, BIA will allow community sourcing with new applications for online manuscript transcription and its online forums for scholarly discussion. Scholars anywhere in the world will now transcribe, edit, and comment on archival material in the database, collaborating in real time and making use of the forums to share expertise and knowledge.

The Medici Archive was established in 1569, and the material, which consists primarily of letters, takes up nearly 1 mile of shelf space. In order to search the BIA digital platform, you must register for a free account. After registering for a free account, you also can save documents and search terms pertaining to your research.

For more information, visit the Medici Archive Project or explore the collection’s highlights pertaining to topics such as Women Artists and Women Patrons of the Arts or Cabinet of Curiosities.

Categories
Ancient Image Quality Images on the Web Innovative Technology Museums VRC

The Digital Dead Sea Scrolls

The Google Cultural Institute and the Israel Museum, Jerusalem collaborated to bring five complete Dead Sea Scrolls online. The new digital library (released Tuesday, December 18), allows users to study and discover the the most ancient biblical manuscripts on earth:

The website gives searchable, fast-loading, high-resolution images of the scrolls, as well as short explanatory videos and background information on the texts and their history. The scroll text is also discoverable via web search. If you search for a phrase from the scrolls, a link to that text within the scroll may surface in your search results. For example, try searching on Google for [And the wolf shall dwell with the lamb Dead Sea Scroll].

English translations of the manuscripts are also available. The Google Cultural Institute is also responsible for the Art Project as well as other digital humanities projects, including Versailles 3D and La France en relief. For the Dead Sea Scrolls project, they used imaging technology originally developed for NASA. The scrolls weren’t discovered until 1947, and they had been in the Qumran caves for two thousand years. ArtDaily reports:

The parchment and papyrus scrolls contain Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic script, and include several of the earliest-known texts from the Bible, including the oldest surviving copy of the Ten Commandments. The oldest of the documents dates to the third century BC and the most recent to about 70 AD, when Roman troops destroyed the Second Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. The artefacts are housed at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, where the larger pieces are shown at the dimly lit Shrine of the Book on a rotational basis in order to minimise damage from exposure. When not on show, they are kept in a dark, climate-controlled storeroom in conditions similar to those in the Qumran caves, where the humidity, temperature and darkness preserved the scrolls for two millennia.

For more information, visit the Digital Dead Sea Scrolls.

Via artdaily.org

Categories
Precolumbian

Maya Tomb at Palenque Explored & Photographed for First Time

National Geographic recently published an article about a Maya tomb at Palenque, which was discovered in 1999. In late November, researchers from Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History entered the tomb for the first time. Last summer, NatGeo published photographs of the temple, which was explored remotely using a small camera (1.6 x 2.4 in.) pushed through a 6 in. hole.

Temple 20 at Palenque contains a royal tomb, well-preserved murals, 11 vessels, and pieces of jade and shell. Because the temple has been inaccessible for so long, its contents are well-preserved. At this point, researchers are not certain who the tomb belongs to.

Via A Blog About History

Images from National Geographic: Entrance to Temple 20, Palenque; “Snake Jaguar” King

Categories
African Images on the Web

The African Diaspora in the Indian Ocean World

The New York Public Library has an online exhibition about African Diaspora throughout the Indian Ocean World, including East Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, the Persian Gulf, South Asia, and farther outlying areas. In addition to contextual essays describing each geographic area, the online exhibition has great image content from the NYPL and other museums and cultural institutions. The images include both historical representations from books and artworks as well as recent photographs, and the website also presents maps and multimedia videos.

For more information, visit the African Diaspora in the Indian Ocean World.